We’ve just added 341,888 records and 1,928,868 images to our Chelsea Pensioners collection for the period 1901-1913.

This completes the WO97 series of our Chelsea Pensioner collection and brings the total amount of these records and images on findmypast.co.uk to 1,033,845 records and 6,131,443 images.

This collection comprises records of men pensioned out of the British Army 1760-1913. The connection with ‘Chelsea Pensioners’ is that the pensions were administered through The Royal Hospital at Chelsea.

For the first time on-line, in colour, you can now see Territorial Force attestations. The Territorial Force was formed in 1908 and so these men would not have appeared in earlier record releases.

Also for the first time, you can view – in colour – attestations for men who joined the Volunteer Service Companies during the Boer War. These men, who had previously served with Volunteer battalions, re-enlisted with these special volunteer service companies and served alongside regular soldiers in the regular regiments.

Here’s a full breakdown of which records we’ve already published on the site and which are still to come:

These records are very special. They’re the closest you can get to looking at a photo of you ancestor as they contain detailed descriptions of a soldier’s physical appearance and any distinguishing features, for example, tattoos or scars. There are usually six or seven records for each soldier and you’ll also be able to see your ancestor’s signature.

We’re working in association with The National Archives and in partnership with FamilySearch on this ongoing project.

Remember that these records are free to search, like all the records on findmypast.co.uk. Even if you’re not sure that any of your ancestors could have been Chelsea Pensioners, try searching the records - your ancestor may have only served in the army for a short time before they were pensioned out.

Find your ancestors in our Chelsea Pensioner records today.

The next issue of Discover My Past England magazine goes online on Thursday 7 October - don’t miss it!

This 42-page A4 issue is packed with special features and how-to guides to connect you with your English Heritage, including:

• An Edwardian working holiday - hop picking in Kent
• Beyond the parish registers - additional records for your family research
• Pity the poor lodger - strangers amongst our kin
• Ancestors in service
• History - and mystery - in York
• Spotlight on - Manchester
• Expert Q&A
• Family history newsround, library and events

Click to enlarge

Learn more about Discover My Past England here.

Hello,

My name is Ian Tester, and I’m the product manager at findmypast.co.uk. That means that it’s my job to try to invent new features on the site to make finding your ancestors easier and more satisfying. I’m also heavily involved in getting new records onto the site, and improving the search features we offer.

I started off in marketing at findmypast.co.uk a few years ago, but it wasn’t until I had spent a winter using findmypast heavily to start building my own family tree that I felt confident to move over into the product manager role.

Ian Tester - making pre-flight checks at home on his farm

I’ve worked on websites for 13 years, but you really can’t work on something as complex as findmypast or develop features for family historians until you have been at the coalface doing your own research and understanding what real family historians need. Perhaps the most important thing for me to learn was: a few years of my own research has left me with an awful lot to learn. This is where the experts come in.

I’ve now got my own (hard-won!) insights into family history research; however, I’m very lucky in that I have access to a lot of highly-skilled and smart people to help me out. The first group of people are my colleagues here in London and Dundee - they’ve got years of experience, many as professional genealogists, and they have unrivalled knowledge of family history records, research and research tools, so they’re always a valuable source of ideas, suggestions and improvements.

Because they’re using the site every day, their feedback tends to come thick and fast and one of my key tasks is stay on top of it all, capture it and make sure we follow up on all those small tweaks and improvements they suggest. In the nicest possible way, they can be quite demanding (which is good for our customers)!

The second group is unique to findmypast.co.uk - the groups of experts that we work with on a day-to-day basis. We’re constantly getting feedback from members of family history societies around the country (and beyond), the Guild of One Name Studies, the Society of Genealogists and of course, The National Archives, who have a dazzling display of subject experts on every set of records that you can imagine. Add to that the expert publishers we work with, such as the Naval and Military Press and Gould Genealogy in Australia and our partners at FamilySearch, and I’m able to tap a range of experts on any subject under the sun.

We often use our partners in the industry as ‘expert reviewers’ to gather early stage feedback, and to demonstrate early versions of new services to before we refine them and put them on the website. For example, when we launched the 1911 census last year, we spent months getting expert feedback from industry experts and made a huge number of changes to the way that the search and website worked before we went live.

Perhaps the most important group, however, are our customers, from whom I get feedback constantly. Key to this is our customer support team, who act as our ‘eyes and ears’ and understand better than anyone the issues or improvements that you suggest. I also attend family history events around the country and this one-to-one contact with customers provides some of the most useful ideas for what we need to do to make your research easier. Finally, we do a lot of market research with our customers, and it’s your generous and constant feedback that helps us decide what to do next and often how to make it work. I once tried to work out how many years of family history experience all our customers combined might have - but gave up when my calculator ran out of digits.

Enough of how we gather feedback - what am I actually working on at the moment and how is it going to make your research easier? Well, there are a number of projects that we’re actively developing features around at the moment. The most important is ‘improving your search’.

Improving your search is not only about adding new records to the site, but also revising the search facilities that we currently offer you and making sure that we make it as easy as possible to find your ancestors in the records.

We already transcribe more fields than other family history websites, meaning that our advanced search features let you search pretty much anything that is in the original record, but we could do better at making our searches cleverer (and, therefore, making you work less hard). For example, we spent a lot of time designing our new fully-indexed births 1837-2006 search to work with some of the idiosyncrasies of the records themselves. So, when the original indexes only record the initial of a second name of an ancestor, our search will intelligently spot that and find you the ‘Andrew P Smethwick’ recorded in the index for the ‘Andrew Peter Smethwick’ you entered into the search.

More cunningly, it will also find you the ‘Unnamed male Smethwick’ you might never have thought of searching for. If you include the mother’s maiden name in your search, it will even try to uncover scandal by finding possible illegitimate births (maybe an Andrew Peter Middleton).

I’m currently working on the fully-indexed marriages which will be on the site in the next few months, and trying to design ways to make this much easier. We’re designing something we’re calling ‘MarriageMatch’ at the moment, which will automatically hunt out and check both partners’ records and make sure that they match each other. These results will be marked as ‘MarriageMatches’ and put right at the top of your search results. This will save you having to look for both partners in a marriage and cross check the reference yourself.

We’re also designing a degree of flexibility into this search - again so it works with the idiosyncrasies of your ancestors and the records, so it will also look for variants in MarriageMatches and find these too. My great grandmother Gertrude Minnie Hardwick was somehow recorded as ‘Hardwicke’ on her marriage certificate. Our new search will still find her for you and match her up automatically with her husband’s marriage record, even though she was married before 1912, which was the first time a partner’s name was recorded in the General Register Office index.

So what’s the lesson in all this? Well, first, that searching records that you might find on other sites is not the same as searching on findmypast.co.uk. We’re aiming to make our new BMD search the best that you can find online. It will be complete and apply extra intelligence to your searches to help you find your ancestors faster and with a higher degree of confidence that you’ve found the right person. Second, that spending time to understand the records thoroughly before we design searches is key to making them work well. Third, that consulting our customers and industry experts gives us some of the best insights we can get into what makes searching records difficult and, therefore, ideas to make it easier.

After marriages, as in life, will come deaths, but I’m also working on incorporating ‘extra’ BMDs into the new BMD searches. Findmypast.co.uk already has the most complete set of GRO indexes 1837-2006 available online (we’ve been diligent at tracking down those missing pieces that other sites may not have got round to over the past seven years) but we’re also going to be adding BMDs at sea and BMDs overseas into the main BMD search in the coming months. They may help solve some of those mysterious missing events.

The new BMD search is just a small part of our ‘improving your search’ project and that project is just one of many that we’re working on to improve your experience on findmypast.co.uk. At the risk of sounding a tease, I’m going to save telling you about some of the other projects for another post. In the meantime, if you have any great ideas…there’s space for comments below.

We’re currently having a few problems with the connection between findmypast and Family Tree Explorer, meaning that you cannot access your family trees at the moment. Rest assured that they are safe, and we are working on a fix now to make them visible gain. We hope to have this fixed soon.

UPDATE: 24/09/10 14:03 - this is now fixed. Apologies again for the interruption in service.

Have you found Scottish ancestors in your family tree? If so, then the new version of the ScotlandsPeople website could hold the key to finding out more about your Scottish roots. The site has many new exciting and advanced features - read on for more information.

Tourism Minister Jim Mather officially launched the new ScotlandsPeople site on 7 September. In addition to all of the new features listed below, there are also new Catholic records, modern indexes to 2009, and a major indexing update of all current records on the site.

• Enhanced free surname search
• One character restrictions on wildcards
• Surname no longer required field in search forms
• Refine search button
• Saved search criteria
• Fuzzy searching, name variant and metaphone options for name fields
• Direct view image viewer
• Easy reporting of transcription and image issues
• Mapping of search results and images
• Advanced searching

Why not take a look today?

ScotlandsPeople centre - doors open day

On Saturday 25 September, the ScotlandsPeople centre will have free 20 minute taster sessions, talks about the records and a fantastic opportunity to walk through the centre to see the wonderful architecture and the archivist’s garden. For more information click here.

The National Archives of Scotland will be offering tours. For more information click here.

Check out the new ScotlandsPeople site today.

It seems that crime writer Agatha Christie, author of the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot detective novels, was somewhat of a mystery woman herself. One eagle-eyed findmypast.co.uk customer, Ian Plimmer, dropped us a line this week to tell us that she actually appears twice in the 1911 census.

Christie, who was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller 120 years ago this month, appears at the home of her grandmother in Ealing, Middlesex on the night the census was taken. The image below shows her listed as Agatha M. C. Miller, aged 20, born in Torquay, Devon.

Agatha Christie in Ealing in the 1911 census - click to enlarge

However, she was also recorded around 200 miles away, living with her mother in Torquay. This census return lists her as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, with her age and place of birth matching the previous record. In the Nationality column on the right of the form, Agatha’s mother noted that her father was American.

Agatha Christie in Torquay in the 1911 census - click to enlarge

We’ve spotted a few examples of people being listed twice in the 1911 census like Agatha Christie was – were any of your own ancestors recorded twice?

The next issue of Discover My Past Scotland magazine goes online on Wednesday 29 September - make sure you don’t miss it.

The 40-page issue is full of special features and how-to guides to connect you with your Scottish Heritage.

Here’s a sneak preview of what you can expect to see in the magazine:

• Get to work! – with your Edwardian & Victorian kinfolk
• Genes Reunited – the easy way to build your family tree
• The School of Scottish Studies – help for your research
• Trace your shipbuilding ancestors
• 1918 and the war goes on – against the deadliest plague in history
• Spotlight on Inverness
• Expert Q&A
• Family history newsround, library and events

Click to enlarge

Find out more about Discover My Past Scotland today.

Findmypast’s marketing manager Debra Chatfield will be giving a talk about the 1911 census at the Devon Family History Society Conference on Saturday 2 October.

Tickets are on sale now, but hurry - your booking form needs to arrive with the Devon FHS by post by Friday 24 September.

Find out more about the conference and complete a booking form here: http://www.devonfhs.org.uk/agm.htm

Debra Chatfield

Our military expert Paul Nixon, pictured, answers your questions.

From Jan Coupland:

‘I’d like some information about 4th V Bri.York Reg. a volunteer force during World War I. Was this the WW1 ‘Dad’s Army’?’

Paul says:

‘The role of the Volunteers during WW1 is a generally over-looked topic – not surprisingly really considering the momentous events that were happening elsewhere in Europe. KW Mitchinson has written the definitive volume about the Volunteer Force, formerly the Volunteer Training Corps, in Defending Albion – Britain’s Home Army 1908-1919 (Palgrave Macmillan, £50).

If there was a WW1 Home Guard equivalent, the Volunteer Force was certainly it. Members of the Volunteer Force (who were usually time-expired old soldiers) wore a brassard with the initials GR (Georgius Rex) emblazoned upon it. This led to them somewhat unfairly being dubbed ‘Georgeous Wrecks’ or ‘God’s Rejects’.’

If you’d like to send your question to our experts, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.

Our military expert Paul Nixon, pictured, answers your questions.

From Doreen Taylor in Binfield, Berkshire:

‘How can I find military records of my uncle, Alfred James Saunderson, born July 1891 in Thames Ditton Surrey? I have tried to find out if he died in the First World War, as I suspect he did. I have not found his name on the Local Cenotaph. I am very interested to find out what happened to him. I hope you can help.’

Paul says:

‘The good news is that there is no Alfred James Saunderson listed on either the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Roll of Honour website, or on the Soldiers Died in The Great War database, so he appears to have survived WW1. A service record for Alfred Saunderson (no middle name) born in 1891 in Thames Ditton, survives in the WO 363 (burnt documents) series. It shows that he enlisted for war-time service only on 4 September 1914 and was given the number 3299. His record may be viewed at The National Archives in Kew.’

If you’d like to send your question to our experts, please register or opt to receive newsletters in My Account.